Accepting normal or average is choosing to be a loser and choosing to fail.  Any news source, talking head or alleged expert proclaiming a new normal should be ignored—immediately.  Turn off the t.v., exit the site or turn and run.  Accepting normal is a far more deadly pandemic than any virus ever has been or every will be.  The “new normal” is a proclamation of accepting crisis and deterring exceptional actions that would cure the ills.  A dumbing down of the exceptional is never the solution to a problem.

For many, a new normal is unhappy utopia.  It is the promised land to bask in woe and don their masks out in the open.  The unhappy seek to add to their ranks and congregate in their chosen state of despair.  Hopefully, they will practice social distancing in these trying times.  Happiness pursuers are the cure to the chosen ills so they avoid all possibility of an antidote just as they have avoided the vaccine of happiness-pursuing freedom since they were able to (fail to) think.  Marginal, incompetent people subtly drag newbies to their new normal with guilt-avoiding words of phony affection.  After not too long however, the scourge of mediocrity becomes eventual despair and the unhappy like it.

Their language that includes the new normal is really nothing new at all.  It is the languor of life’s losers. There have always been, and always will be, the haves and the have-nots.  The dichotomy has zero to do with money, wealth or anything tangible; it has only to do with a simple choice between taking action to pursue happiness in life or not.  The happy haves reach far beyond normal and the unhappy have-nots fail to seek anything beyond the mediocrity of an ever-lowering bar.  The new normal is a jaded game of limbo and the end is always the same—the bar is set even lower and the willing participants will not reach it.

The language of positive thought and action is the path to happiness.  Do not accept normal whether it is marketed as something old or new.  Reject it.  Think of the best, act to be the best and you cannot fail to advance yourself toward the best.  Now that’s the happy talk.

KPF